Subj : Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
To   : poindexter FORTRAN
From : tenser
Date : Wed Jan 10 2024 13:16:37

On 09 Jan 2024 at 06:10a, poindexter FORTRAN pondered and said...
 
 pF> -=> tenser wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-
 pF> 
 pF>  te> Hey, with IBM pushing AI to translate those piles of
 pF>  te> dusty COBOL into Java, maybe you'd never need it!
 pF> 
 pF> I don't know, someone needs to run the AI, right? At least for the time
 pF> being...

I'm not sure what you mean by "run"....  But yeah, right
now humans are firmly in charge of the whole shebang.

 pF> My son is about to graduate with a marketing communications degree. I
 pF> don't think AI is going to render him unemployable, I think the jobs are
 pF> going to change. There won't be tons of human content creators, rather a
 pF> handful of people who can effectively leverage AI to create content.

I think the real innovation is going to be treating the AI
like a tool to augment the human.  "Read this report and
summarize the top 5 most salient points."  Something _I_
would love would be, "absorb this datasheet and emit a set
of definitions corresponding to the device's hardware
registers and their values in language X."

 pF> Ditto for coding. If one person managing a LLM can replace a small team,
 pF> people can focus on program logic and let the LLM do the heavy lifting -
 pF> the same way that computers allowed mathmeticians to stop doing the
 pF> repetitive calculations and focus on the big picture.

Yup.  Or the way high-level languages let the programmer
focus on the algorithms relevant to the problem at hand,
and not so much which register is in use at which time.

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